Buy it... if you long suffered from Alan Menken's absence from
Disney during the late 1990's and early 2000's, for Home on the
Range lovably reintroduced a decent shadow of his formula back into
the studio's animated offerings.

Avoid it... if you expect to hear the quality that Menken produced
in his efforts for the studio during his peak and later in the 2000's,
because his songs don't adhere to satisfying narrative rules and the
score is a reprise of City Slickers.

EDITORIAL REVIEW

FILMTRACKS TRAFFIC RANK: #558

WRITTEN
4/10/04, REVISED 10/10/11

BUY IT

Menken

Home on the Range: (Alan Menken) Disney claimed for
many years that each of its successive children's productions
represented the "last 2-D animation" from their studios, but the format
has endured longer than expected. One of these claims involved the 2004
flop Home on the Range, which, at 76 minutes in running time, may
have best gone straight to video. Mainstream critics put a lashing on
the film, a comedy in which talking animals help save their farm by
taking matters into their own control (not exactly in Animal Farm
fashion, but rather in a Wild West in which yodeling is used as a
brainwashing technique on cows). The vocal talent was top notch as
usual, led by Judi Dench, Cuba Gooding Jr., Steve Buscemi, and Roseanne
Barr. The formula of Disney's 1990's musicals was clearly the mould for
Home on the Range, which seemed like stab at easy profits in
regards to its lowly production values, but it was perhaps fitting that
songwriter Alan Menken be brought back for one more cookie-cutter 2-D
musical for the studio. Enthusiasts of the composer were nevertheless
optimistic about the opportunity to hear him in action more than ten
years after he had left his most popular moment in the spotlight. Before
his resurrection in the late 2000's, if you were to study a film
composer's rapid ascent into stardom and equally hasty descent back into
obscurity, then Menken would have been your perfect subject. Winning
eight Academy Awards (more than Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Hans
Zimmer, Danny Elfman, and half a dozen other major composers of the era
combined) in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Menken already
enjoyed a distinguished place in both the history of Hollywood musicals
and film music legend. His vast popularity in 1992 was hard to measure;
after The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and
Aladdin, Menken was all the rage to kids, teens, and many adults.
The entire concept of the animated musical was reborn, leading to a
"best picture" Oscar nomination for Beauty and the Beast as a
whole. It was not uncommon in those years for Menken to have two or
three of his songs from any given film nominated for Oscars as well, and
he alone caused the AMPAS reaction of creating separate score and song
award categories for several years. But after sustaining interest with
Pocahontas 1995, the animation world was changing from flat 2-D
animation to modern CGI and 3-D, and the format of the musical was
giving way to straight animated features.

After suffering from lackluster support for The
Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996 and producing the disastrous
Hercules in 1997, Menken's reign over Disney's 2-D musicals came
to an end. Other composers began rotating in the duties of this genre,
with even scoring legend Jerry Goldsmith making an entry for
Mulan in 1998. Menken almost fell off the face of the earth after
1997, with a career stalled in limbo despite the fact he had made enough
money to support himself for a lifetime. Granted, his output declined in
his later scores, but if you are of the generation of movie-goers who
also believes that Menken will always have his place in the animation
industry, then you were intrigued, if not simply relieved, to see his
return with Home on the Range. And while the project did not
resurrect the same level of acclaim for the composer, it did open the
door a successful return to Disney that yielded the far more popular
Enchanted and Tangled in the following years. Even if you
were never a Menken fan in the first place, Home on the Range
showcases several offbeat extensions of Marc Shaiman's sound for the
City Slickers scores, highlighted by champion Western yodeling
rendered in ways you never thought possible. Menken seems to embrace
these ridiculous comedy styles with great pleasure. The Western swing
that he creates for Home on the Range has all of the upbeat style
of innocuous 1940's singing cowboy films starring Gene Autry and Roy
Rogers. The pace of the rhythms, the whistling in the background, and
quotations taken from famous Western themes of past generations are
thrown at the listener in a rapid-fire format consistent with a modern
76-minute film, though. On quick glance, the songs and score seem to be
identical in underlying format to Menken's previous efforts, with six
songs followed by an equal score selection and song reprises mixed
throughout. Still, the difference here is that the characters themselves
aren't performing the songs as they always had in the past (can none of
those lead actors sing?); only Randy Quaid has the token villain
performance as himself in a song, a disappointing departure for Menken's
previous methodology. An interesting analysis appeared in the Boston
Globe in response to this change: "...while Alan Menken's songs are as
catchy as ever, it's been a long, slow descent from the grace and spirit
of The Little Mermaid to this. Where a Disney movie once used
songs to deepen the characters or dazzle the audience, now they're just
stunt interludes for such marquee names as Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and
Tim McGraw to move units of the soundtrack CD."

Indeed, where Home on the Range is most lacking
is in the extension of the narrative into the songs. Menken created a
hybrid in which a Phil Collins-type of collection of narrators sings
about the story rather than having the characters create the magic
themselves. The best aspects of Home on the Range, on the other
hand, are those which actually do adhere to Menken's winning formula and
add to it for comedy purposes. The opening chorus song is a throwback to
the prelude of The Little Mermaid, and it is appropriately
repised. The heartfelt primary character song has been replaced by
"Little Patch of Heaven," the clearly film's best song, performed
adorably by k.d. lang (in motherly mode) once in full and as the finale
reprise. The villain's song is hysterically conceived as a mad-yodeling
piece in which famous tunes with Western affiliations are performed by
yodelers (Quaid doesn't actually perform the yodeling), and you can
receive this with either head-shaking humor or the horror of
contemplating the depths of despair for Menken's career. Tim McGraw's
"Wherever the Trail May Lead" is generic and pointless in this context.
The only intolerable song is the pop version of "Anytime You Need a
Friend," performed by The Beu Sisters and standing out like a very sore
thumb. The score itself has all the charm of Menken's previous efforts,
with pieces of Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre
Dame evident and the Western theme from the opening chorus showing
hints of "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Listening to this
score is a refreshing taste of innocence on one hand but a ghostly
reminder of the better glory days for the genre on the other. Snippets
of that old Menken magic rebound in portions of both the score and songs
for Home on the Range, but it's difficult to compare it to
Menken's others given its distinct genre style. He does spice up the
equation with several credited statements of Ennio Morricone's The
Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a few uncredited influences from
Elmer Bernstein as well. Menken's own version of the end title song,
performed himself vocally and on solo piano, seems to try to borrow an
idea from Randy Newman's success at the time. In the end, Home on the
Range succeeds best when Menken follows the formulas that brought
him his prior triumphs, including the constant adaptation of the song
melodies into the score. Unfortunately, Home on the Range may not
have been the best of films with which to make a comeback, and it does
sound like City Slickers far too frequently, but it represented
an important start to Menken's Disney comeback. To hear him starting his
engines once again in 2004, however, barely gained his efforts a fourth
star. ****@Amazon.com: CD or
Download

Bias Check:

For Alan Menken reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.62
(in 13 reviews)and the average viewer rating is 3.52
(in 57,638 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.